If nothing else, this recent round of ultrabooks hitting the market of late proves that Cupertino doesn’t have a monopoly on turning out sleek, thin, powerful, and sexy-looking notebooks. While Apple’s MacBook Air products are spectacular, so are the new Windows 7 ultrabooks coming down the pike. So far, we’ve looked at two of them—Acer’s $899.99 Aspire S3-951 and Asus’s $1,199 ZenBook Ux21E. Both are impressive machines with lots to offer today’s modern road warrior, but this new clash of the ultra-thin, light and powerful laptops shoot-out has just begun. With each new offering we find ourselves all the more impressed. These are indeed exciting times for the Windows notebook market.

Next up is the 13.3-inch Toshiba Portege Z830 line of ultrabooks, starting with the $799 Z835 (our review unit) base model, which will be available exclusively as of November 13, 2011 at Best Buy. The Z835 runs Windows 7 Home Premium and sports the 1.4GHz Intel Core i3-2367M CPU (a.k.a. Sandy Bridge), 4 GB of RAM, and a 128GB SSD (solid-state drive). Down the road (Toshiba won’t say when), several other outlets will offer the Z835 (under the Z830 SKU) and two other models. Again, we don’t know when, but you’ll eventually be able to buy a $1,199 configuration that comes with the Intel Core i5-2467M CPU, 4GB RAM, Windows 7 Professional, as well as a $1,429 version that comes with Windows 7 Pro, the 1.8GHz Intel Core i7-2677M CPU and 6GB RAM. In addition, on Toshiba’s Website (ToshibaDirect.com), you will be able to configure your Portege Z830 to order with your choice of CPUs, up to 8GB RAM and up to a 256GB SSD. (Toshiba also refuses to show its hand on the release date of these products.

If nothing else, this recent round of ultrabooks hitting the market of late proves that Cupertino doesn’t have a monopoly on turning out sleek, thin, powerful, and sexy-looking notebooks. While Apple’s MacBook Air products are spectacular, so are the new Windows 7 ultrabooks coming down the pike. So far, we’ve looked at two of them—Acer’s $899.99 Aspire S3-951 and Asus’s $1,199 ZenBook Ux21E. Both are impressive machines with lots to offer today’s modern road warrior, but this new clash of the ultra-thin, light and powerful laptops shoot-out has just begun. With each new offering we find ourselves all the more impressed. These are indeed exciting times for the Windows notebook market.

“In September 1994, Hewlett-Packard introduced the first Color LaserJet printer. It had 8MB of memory, printed color pages at the rate of two per minute, and retailed for—holy cow!—$7,295. Now, 15 years later, HP has introduced the LaserJet Pro 100 multifunction printer. (Unlike that first print-only model, this one prints, copies, and scans.) It has 128MB of RAM, prints color pages at the rate of four per minute, and retails for $349, more than 20 times less than that original color LaserJet. Fifteen years ago, very few businesses could justify or afford the luxury of a color laser printer. Nowadays, nearly every small or home-based business that wants to can take advantage of laser technology—and get a color copier and scanner to boot.” –

After looking at many Android tablets, I’ve finally found one that doesn’t look and act like the others. Sony has come out with quite the entertainment value here. Click here to see the Computer Shopper review.